9 Words That Mean Something Completely Different in Texas
Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state.
Somewhere along the way from one county line to the next, an ordinary English word starts meaning something else.
A transplant finds out mid-sentence, usually in front of people who assumed everybody already knew.
These are the words that mean something completely different once someone crosses into Texas.
1. Buggy
Texas shoppers push a buggy through the grocery store, not a cart, and the word already means something else everywhere outside the South.
A buggy, across much of the country, is a small carriage a horse pulls, or a stroller a parent pushes down the sidewalk.
Not in Texas.
A regional dictionary entry traces buggy’s grocery-cart sense chiefly to the South, Appalachia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while much of the North and West just say cart.
Ask for a buggy at a store outside Texas, and a clerk might picture a stroller instead of a cart full of groceries.
2. Coke
Texas menus and diners use Coke as the catchall word for any soda, not just the brand a can holds elsewhere.
Order a Coke in Lubbock or Waco, and the next question back is what kind.
Dr Pepper counts.
So does root beer, orange soda, or an actual Coca-Cola. A widely cited dialect map colors nearly the entire South, Texas included, as Coke territory, while the Midwest mostly says pop and the coasts say soda.
A waiter who asks a Texan what kind of Coke they want isn’t confused. He’s just following the local script.
3. Fixin’
Texans say they’re fixin’ to do something, and outsiders sometimes wait for a toolbox that never shows up.
Fixing, everywhere else, means repairing what’s broken, a leaky faucet, a flat tire, a torn shirt.
No wrench required.
Fixin’ to means about to, getting ready to act within the next few minutes. Researchers at Yale trace the phrase to the Gulf South and Texas, more than almost anywhere else in the country.
A Texan who says they’re fixin’ to leave already has one foot out the door.
4. Icehouse
Texas icehouses started out exactly like the name suggests, small South Texas stores that sold block ice before refrigerators reached rural homes.
An icehouse, standing alone as a word almost anywhere else, means a building built to store and preserve ice.
Not in South Texas.
Once refrigerators reached rural Texas in the 1940s, those old ice-delivery stores started selling cold beer and setting out domino tables, and the icehouse name stuck to the open-air neighborhood bar that grew out of it.
A San Antonio icehouse today serves longnecks, not ice cubes.
5. Chunk
Texans chunk a football, a rock, or a wadded-up napkin across the yard, using chunk as a verb that means to throw.
Texas Monthly traces the usage back to an 1877 dictionary of Americanisms that already labeled it Southern and Western.
Everyday English uses the same word differently, for a thick, solid piece of something: A chunk of cheese, a chunk of change.
Never a verb.
Chunk that football over here, and everybody in the yard already knows exactly what you mean before it leaves your hand.
6. Tuna
South Texans have been calling the fruit of the prickly pear cactus tuna for centuries, long before Texas was Texas.
Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca left one of the earliest written records of Native peoples in the region harvesting, eating, and trading tuna, and the Coahuiltecans who called South Texas home treated it as a summer staple.
Texas claims more than 100 species of prickly pear today, and H-E-B stores and roadside stands across the Rio Grande Valley still sell the pink, spiny fruit by the bagful every summer.
Not a fish in sight.
Say tuna outside Texas, and many people picture a can, a sandwich, or a fishing boat, never a cactus.
7. Tank
Texas ranchers call it a tank, never a pond, and the two words point to two completely different things.
Everywhere else, a tank holds something inside walls, gasoline, propane, water pumped up from a well.
Nobody calls it a pond.
On a Hill Country or Panhandle spread, a tank is a small, muddy, man-made reservoir that ranchers built by damming a low spot or bulldozing a pit to catch rain runoff for cattle and sheep.
Call it a pond around a rancher, and the word marks a person as someone who just moved to Texas.
How Big Is a Texas Tank?
Texas ranchers have built roughly 840,000 of these reservoirs across the state, more than any other state, according to Texas A&M University.
Size swings wildly by region.
The average tank covers about four-tenths of an acre.
A South Texas tank can spread across 25 acres, while some East Texas tanks are small enough to jump across.
About 80% of them hold fish, mostly channel catfish or bass, according to the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, even when nobody ever stocked them.
8. Draw
Texas maps carry dozens of places named some kind of draw, and the word means something totally different than a tie score or a raffle.
Outside Texas, draw usually means a contest that ends even, or a name pulled from a hat.
Nobody hands out a prize.
A draw is a shallow, mostly dry channel that only runs with water after a hard rain, a landform so common across Texas and the rest of the semi-arid West that geographers gave it its own definition separate from a creek or a canyon.
Howard Draw and Sulphur Springs Draw both stay bone dry on the map until the next hard rain.
9. Trill
Port Arthur rapper Bun B built a career on the word trill, and it has nothing to do with a rolled r or a musical scale.
“Trill is about being honest with yourself about the people around you,” he told the Texas Observer.
Not a music term.
Trill blends the words true and genuine into a single term that started on the streets of his hometown long before Underground Kingz (UGK) carried it into Houston and the rest of the country.
Bun B’s 2018 solo album, Return of the Trill, put a Port Arthur highway sign on the cover instead of a music note.
Bun B still calls Port Arthur “the land of the trill,” tracing the word to a street corner in his hometown.
UGK, the duo he formed with Pimp C, carried the word into its lyrics for years before trill ever spread beyond Texas.
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